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Pilgrim Grave Robbers & Syphilis

November 24, 2008

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RUSH: Now, we've gone through the past couple of days The Real Story of Thanksgiving. It's a tradition on this program on the day before Thanksgiving to actually read that story from one of my two best sellers, but there's a story in the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times today. The headline: "The Pilgrims Were Really Grave Robbers." The story is by Mike Ivey.

"Everything you know about the 'first' Thanksgiving is wrong. Plymouth Rock. Pilgrims. Perseverance. Big feast. Happy Indians sharing in the bounty. It's all bunk, except maybe the part about eating turkey. Early settlers were so hungry they ate about anything with fur or feathers. Otherwise, there is little connection between reality and the version of Thanksgiving events still taught in most schools. That point was hammered home Sunday by award-winning filmmaker Patty Loew. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew was the keynote speaker at the third annual 'Interfaith Thanksgiving Celebration' held at Lakeview Lutheran Church on Madison's north side. Loew said the problem with the traditional Thanksgiving story is that it plays to the American version of history where peace loving English settlers tame the wilderness and survive attacks from the bloodthirsty Indians. 'It's the quintessential American holiday,' she said. 'It involves escaping danger, surviving in a harsh environment, carving out a new life.' Unfortunately, Loew says, the whole Thanksgiving story is nothing but myth. In reality, the Indian tribes living along the Eastern seaboard had been decimated by disease in the years preceding the storied landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620."

What was it that destroyed the Indians? Give me a guess, Mr. Snerdley. From this wacko leftist historian, what was it, what decimated the Indians? Well, yes, it was bubonic plague, but who brought it? Right. "An epidemic of bubonic plague, most likely, " most likely, "brought to the New World by European fishermen in 1617, had killed an estimated 90 percent of the Native population by the time the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts." The program observer has a question. What's the question? Mmm-hmm. I don't know why the white guys never caught anything from the Indians in history, but let me stick with this because this gets even better. Okay, so where are we now? In 1617 early-arriving European fishermen brought bubonic plague that wiped out 90% of the Indians. When the Pilgrims showed up, what they found "were empty villages with crops still in the field because the Indians had either died or left." Now, wait just a second, now. Just a second, now. "The more religious of the settlers -- only 32 of the 102 who landed at Plymouth were actually Pilgrims -- thought the existing villages and cleared fields were a sign that God was providing for them. Other settlers took to digging up the graves of Indians, picking through the housewares, blankets or weapons buried with the dead. 'So the first Thanksgiving in America was actually held by grave robbers,' said Patty Loew, filmmaker.

"Loew challenged the audience to tell the correct version of events and think about what it means when they celebrate this Thursday with family or friends. 'We're not just talking about feel good history, but history that reflects the truth,' said Loew, a longtime local TV anchor who serves as associate professor of life sciences communications at UW-Madison. ... If the crops were still standing in the fields--" I guess 90% of the Indians must have just died overnight, you know, right before the harvest. "If the crops were still standing in the fields and they were robbing graves, why didn't the Pilgrims get the bubonic plague?" What spared them from getting the bubonic plague that these European fishermen trucked over in 1617? Thanksgiving was not the first year, either. It took a long time here for the Pilgrims to have enough of a life to be thankful for anything, to anybody. This is the multicultural curriculum. You sit here and tell jokes about it, "Oh, yeah the early white Europeans they brought syphilis. They brought environmental destruction," but it's being taught. It's being taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and there were 200 people that showed up for this film documentary on the "history" of the first Thanksgiving.

Well, let me tell you something. I know it can't be proved because of the two words "most likely." The Indians were "decimated...most likely by a disease." It can't be proven. Nobody knows. This is just a multicultural curriculum which is designed to get as many little kids as possible to question the decency and the goodness of their own country.